Lovis Corinth

German Impressionist artist Lovis Corinth was born in Gvardeysk (Tapiau), which was in a province in the Kingdom of Prussia, in 1858. His full name was Franz Heinrich Louis Corinth. He joined the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich as a student in 1880, and there he was introduced to the styles of the Barbizon School (a movement towards Realism) and to the works of French Realist painter Gustave Courbet. The movement was a shift towards natural scenes of landscapes and genre, depicting the people who lived and worked in the fields and on farms. Corinth was also a printmaker, preferring lithography and drypoint, but not aquatint, and he briefly tried etchings and woodcuts.

Munich artists Wilhelm Trübner and Wilhelm Leibl had brought their interpretation of ideals of the Barbizon School movement to Munich, and in 1884 Corinth went to Paris to study at the Académie Julian. His instructor there was William-Adolphe Bouguereau, a French traditionalist and academic painter. In 1898 he joined with the Berlin Secession group, which was a large group of young artists who banded together in opposition to the state-run Association of Berlin Artists. The original founder and first president of the movement was Max Lieberman, and Corinth became the next president after him. By then, Corinth had become one of the leading German Impressionist painters of the time.

In 1900 Corinth moved to Berlin, and found a good opportunity to open a school for young women who wanted to learn to paint. He was 43 when he fell in love with his very first student, 23 year old Charlotte Berend, and they soon married and had two children together. Some of his personal paintings listed here are Self Portrait with Skeleton (1896), Self Portrait with Model (1903) and The Artist and His Family (1909), although he did paint more self portraits and family portraits in his later years. Other paintings of different characters and dramatic themes include Salome II (1900), The Athenaeum - Odysseus Fighting with the Beggar (1903) and Cain (1912).

Corinth was thoroughly against the expressionist movement, and he maintained a naturalistic approach until 1911, when he suffered a stroke. After training hard to get his hand to regain the ability to paint, Corinth was able to produce paintings again. His stroke seemed to have loosened up his style and his work from then on showed more of the expressionist qualities he’d always disliked. His landscapes and portraits suddenly became vibrant and powerful with the use of richer and bolder colors on his palette. There was a much cruder element in his paintings, seemingly more pessimistic and violent, in a way; his outlook on life may have shifted downwards after his stroke. He passed away in 1925 from complications from pneumonia, while in Zaandvort, Netherlands. He had gone there on a visit to view the works of his favorite Dutch artists.

One of his works, a self-portrait, hangs in the Museum of Modern Art, while others are scattered throughout museums in Europe, including a museum in his birthplace of Tapiau. Another of his paintings, called the Golgatha, was donated by Corinth as an altarpiece to a church in Tapiau in 1910. It's now lost, as it appears to have been looted from the church shortly after World War II. Lovis Corinth produced more than nine hundred art works during his lifetime, of which most are museum pieces.